Category: DIY

Today, I went into Pat Catans with a very specific idea in mind. I needed one things and I was convinced that they had to have it. I searched far and wide for that thing. But this thing I could not find. So of course I had to come up with another idea mid-search so that I didn’t leave one of my favorite places empty handed (also, if you spent over $30 you got a free yankee candle, hell yeah). So I dug deep in my brain to think of things I had still wanted to do for the apartment (apartment tour coming in the next few months!) and I remembered that I was super irritated with the fact that I couldn’t find my keys at least three times on the day that we moved in and stayed there, and viola, the Key Hanger idea entered my brain and I was set on that. I am super happy with the way this project turned out. It was super easy and You can personalize it to your own style! Here is how I did it!

I purchased all of these items from Pat Catans. I bought a round piece of wood, and I bought it with the bark on the sides because I thought it would give it a bit more ~personality~. I had no idea what I wanted on the wood at first, but I stumbled upon the adorable lock/key wood cut-out and I knew I needed that on the hanger because, duh, I am going to hang keys on it! My ideas started running from there. I saw the cute little wooden hearts, and I knew I needed those. I decided then that I was going to put a quote on the hanger as well. I bought letter stencils at this point. They look like letters that would be on some sort of shipping crate, and I liked how that looked. I then decided that having the background just be the wood would be boring; I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied with the end product if I didn’t get a little ~extra~ with it. So I bought the flower stencil because flowers are cute, duh. For the stenciling, I bought little “stamper” brushes in order to dab, dab, dab my letters and the flowers on the wood. Finally, I found the actual hooks, which took me for freaking EVER (Thanks for rearranging the store, my hometown Pat Catans >:-(…). Anywho, I found them and I settled on these cute hooks. I liked how they were while, and had the wooden ball on the end, and I thought it would match well with the bark on the sides! I also bought a hook for the back so I could hang it, I just used screws from home to adhere these things to the hanger, and I used acrylic paint for everything.

To start off, I painted one of the little hearts a baby pink color, and I let that dry on the side. Then, I drilled the holes so I knew where my hooks would go and also attached the hook to the back of the hanger, like sooooo….

It’s important that your screws are not longer than the depth of your wood, because then the screw will go through the wood, leaving a gaping hole, and you will be one sad DIYer. Also make sure when drilling the holes you don’t go through the wood either. The same sadness will occur.

Next, I dove in to dabbing on my white paint with my flower stencil. I wanted it to look imperfect, so I didn’t try to hard to keep all of the flowers in line. I was going from the rustic, distressed look…….and it turned out like this!

Some flowers are darker than others and some are faded. I think this make it look “older” in a way.

Next, I stenciled in the letters. This was definitely a challenge. These letters are not perfect by any means, but they give the piece some character by not being perfect. As we all know, I am a bit impatient, so the flaws in the letters are mostly due to the fact that I wanted to see the end result out of excitement! So I would dab too hard or more on to the next letter too fast. For the best results, just be patient and wait until the first letter dries!

Finally, my letters were done and I added on the heart and the key/lock. I then screwed in my hooks with a bit of a stagger. The aren’t completely even, and I promise I did that on purpose! I think it looks very rustic and it will fit really well in my new apartment! and viola! The finished product!

I hope you enjoyed this DIY, and I hope you will try it out for yourself! I would love to see everyone’s own style! Thanks!

Hello all!! Lately I have been super into the denim skirt trend, but not into the spending money trend lol! Denim skirts are very trendy right now, and you can get them for “affordable prices” but I need better than affordable. I need dirt cheap! I decided that I wanted to make something that is totally mine and unique AND friendly to my bank account. Here’s what you’ll need!

Denim skirt

Hot glue gun/glue sticks

Scissors

Ribbon/fabric/any decorative thing you want

Pins/ bobby pins (for hemming)

This was literally sooo easy and soooo affordable! I got my skirt from Goodwill. It was a very lucky find! I paid $3.25 for the skirt. This is the original state of the skirt:

It was a little long for my taste, so I tried the skirt on and cut around the bottom to my liking and I made sure it wasn’t too short (you may have to leave the back slightly longer if it is real denim). This skirt was not real denim. It was more of a stretchy material, but it still looks denim. This is why I didn’t try to “fray” the bottom like I originally planned. I then folded the part I cut under (inside the skirt) and pinned it so it would all stay the same length. You could sew it, but I am lazy and again, I like immediate results because I am impatient, and I used a glue gun to make the hem of the skirt. I just went around the whole bottom of he skirt. I then took this ribbon (?) type stuff that I got from Pat Catans and I clued it around the pocketed area. I thought this gave it a cute accent and I can still pretty much wear it with anything! This is the final result!

And here is a close up of the ribbon I used:

I did this DIY in probably 30 minutes. It was super easy, cheap, and fun! And now I have a new cute skirt that is all my own! Hope you enjoyed!

So with tomorrow being fathers day, I decided to post a little DIY that I came up with that I made for my Grandpa! My grandpa is in a nursing home, so there we were kinda limited with gifts to get him. He has very few interests, especially after his stroke, but there are a few things that make him happy and one of those is racing. One of the first conversations he had with us after his stroke was about his memories of his cars and racing back in the day. He has come a long way since his stroke, and we just didn’t know what to do for him since he doesn’t live at home anymore, so we decided his room needed a little sprucing up at the nursing home! I suggested a wreath, because that’s festive, and there’s nothing wrong with being festive all year round. I knew that I didn’t want to just buy him any old wreath, because thats impersonal and no fun! So I decided to incorporate something he loves into it (surprise, it’s race car themed). Of course, you can recreate this wreath with any colors, fabrics, and add-ons that you want! Here’s how I did it!

First, you will need a few things to get started!

wreath ring (however large you like; bigger ring = more tooling)

tool/burlap/ribbon (preferably with wire in it to hold shape, i usually just guesstimate how much I will need, but I bough about 3 yards of it)

wire

scissors

hot glue gun and hot glue

mesh tubing (this is extra just for some fun! I only used a small amount of this)

any add ons that you would like (mine were toy cars)

Wreath Ring

Tooling

Wire

Mesh Tubing

I am someone who likes to just tackle projects, so I never really measure how much stuff I use. I do know that I used the whole tube of tool that I bought, but I had left-overs of everything else.

My biggest tip if you get stuck is to look up how to make a burlap wreath on Youtube. I have made wreathes before, and I used burlap. You will use the same technique no matter the fabric you purchase. A wreath ring should have 3 smaller rings inside the ring. This is how you get the beautiful “tufts” of the ribbon or tool around your ring. Basically, you go through the smallest ring first, wrapping the first few inches of tool around the ring and then using your wire to adhere it to the ring. You could also use hot glue if you wanted. Next, you weave the ribbon, leaving “tufts” of it in-between each new section of the ring. When you reach the top ring, you will want to twist your tool, and start in the bottom ring again and repeat the weaving (I refer to this as the weave-and-twist). If you notice in the picture of the ring, there are 4 sections in the ring. I usually do 2-3 weave-and-twists in each section of the wreath. Depending on your fabric, you can do more or less, but you want it to be very dense. You don’t want gaps on the wreath, or you’ll be able to see the rings underneath. Weave-and-twist until you have something that looks like this:

You can then adjust your “tufts” and finish the body of the wreath by tying it down with wire or hot glue. I used all of my tool, about 3 yards, for this wreath.

Next comes the fun! Decorating! So I wanted this to ~kinda~ look like a checkered flag. I looked for checkered ribbon at my local Pat Catan’s, but they didn’t have any so I had to do my best to improvise. I decided on the black tool and the silver/black mesh tubing. So, to do the “checkers” I used the mesh tubing and cut off about 8 inches for each “checker”. I folded it over each other into something that looks like this: (and binded it together with wire)

I then placed these somewhat sporadically throughout the wreath where I thought they would look a bit like checkers.

Finally, I added the cars I bought and viola! A race car themed wreath!

I ended up spending only 20$ on all of the supplies listed, so this is an easy, cheap solution to someone who is stumped on what to get someone!

Hi everyone! I’ve been MIA for a hot second, but thats because I have been working on a lot of projects for my new apartment! I have been doing a lot to make my new apartment my own and to make it feel like home, and just seeing the final product of these chairs has inspired me to continue. This project was my favorite one, and I have been so excited to show it to you! I am gonna show you lots of before/after shots and tell you exactly how I achieved the perfect style for my taste!

Let’s start with the origin of these chairs. My grandpa has been in a nursing home for over a year now due to a stroke. Unfortunately, we do not think that he will ever be able to return home and live on his own, so we have been doing a lot of cleaning and organizing of his house. My grandpa was what some may call a hoarder, but I’d like to refer to him as a collector. It just sounds better and is more mysterious. He has just about anything anyone could ever want, including tires, engines, old cars, tools, nick nacks, cooking appliances, lawn care appliances; seriously, you name it, he has it. SO, we go over there to do some minor cleaning and my dad sees these chairs. Turns out, there are 6 chairs to the set and they are basically hidden sporadically throughout the house. After we find all of them, I was convinced that they needed to be saved. We could only find 5 of the chairs, and one was completely snapped in half, but I figured I could make something out of it. These chairs are probably somewhere around 60-70 years old, if not older. They belonged to my great grandma and were just passed down.

Now, onto the process. These chairs were in bad shape. The varnish was just naturally coming off of them, some of the rungs were broken, and they were just really dirty. Everything about them was just…old. Here is an example of the state these were in.

As you can tell, I didn’t have much to work with here. I starter with covering the seats since I wanted to upholster them, and I thought it would be fairly easy. I went to JoAnn Fabrics and got 5 seat cushions, or foam squares, and picked out a pattern that met my fancy. I picked this multi-colored, mandala-ish pattern because I liked the colors and I thought it would give the apartment some pizzazz. This is the pattern I chose.

To upholster the seats, I took the seats off of the chairs, which basically consisted of using a screwdriver and unscrewing the screws from the back/bottom of the chairs. I then had 4 chair seats, and one seat that would become a bench. Lucky for me, my foam squares matched almost perfect to the actual shape of the seat. I ended up cutting off some foam on the sides but then adding it to the top since my seat was a bit longer vertically and it was narrower at the back of the seat than the front. I then covered the foam and the seat with my fabric. (I got 2 yards of fabric, and I just cut it myself into squares by just putting the seat + foam on the fabric and drawing in marker where I wanted to cut it, leaving room for the fabric to cover the top completely and enough room to staple the fabric underneath the seat). I left about 3-4 inches of fabric on each side so I had enough fabric to be stapled onto the bottom of the seat. Now, this was my first time ever upholstering anything, so it was a learning experience for me. I looked a bit into it on Pinterest, but other than that I was going in blind. I stapled, with a staple gun, the sides of the chair first, then front and back. I saved the corners for last. When doing the corners, I found that it was easiest to slightly twist them so that you can pull from both sides of the fabric, and finally I stapled that corners down. I finished 5 seats in a matter of an hour. I was pleasantly surprised by how little effort was needed to do this. This was my final product for the seats.

Next up, I had to make the decision of what color to paint the chairs and how I was going to do it. I decided that I wanted to use minimal effort and high efficiency when painting these chairs. I am not a woman with patience, so spray painting the chairs was the best option for me. I went to Menards and picked out 2 colors because I am indecisive and impulsive. My gut told me that navy blue and grey would look good together, so thats what I bought. I bought Rustoleum spray-paint with primer included, because if you can kill two birds with one stone, why not? I’m all about saving time because again, I am impatient and I desire immediate results. I sanded down and washed off the chairs, and then began the painting! I ended up using 1 can each for all of the chairs. It took me about 2 hours to paint all of the chairs. I did 2 coats each since I missed some spots the first time around. Here are the results of the painting.

This is the chair w/o the seat before paint.

This is the chair after; a totally new chair!

Aaaaaaand the final result of all of the chairs painted (don’t mind the messy garage; my dad has some spring cleaning to do!).

I let these sit about 2 days just to make sure they were dry. Today, my dad and I screwed the seats back on to the chairs, and they turned out better than I ever imagined. I feel like these chairs now have a second chance at life!

And viola! The final product!

***BONUS DIY: How To Make A Stool Out Of A Broken Chair***

Earlier in this post I said that there were actually 6 chairs; one was lost in the house somewhere and the other was snapped in half. Well, I couldn’t just leave the snapped one there. I was originally just going to use the broken one for practice; the seat was fine and the legs were fine, the back had just been broken off.

As you can see, it was a pretty gnarly break right off of the back of the chair. Halfway through my project with the chairs I decided to give this little broken chair a second chance too, so I made it into a stool! I proceeded with the same process as all of the other chairs, I upholstered the seat, and cleaned the chair. But obviously, I didn’t want a stool with wood sticking out to poke someone! So my dad and I sawed the broken part off and made the frame completely even all the way around. We then sanded it and cleaned it off so it was ready to paint. Finally we screwed the seat on and viola, an adorable stool!

I hope you guys liked this DIY because I was super excited to show you how to do it! More DIY’s coming soon!